Normal People

Frances and Nick are in their final year at Trinity College Dublin — they know each other in the particular way that intelligent people who have spent too much time together know each other: with complete familiarity, without complete understanding. When Frances starts an affair with Nick, a married actor ten years older, and his wife Melissa becomes her friend, the four of them form a constellation whose gravitational pull proves stronger than any of them anticipated. Sally Rooney’s second novel is the work in which she fully became herself: precise, intelligent, warm, and utterly unsparing about the ways in which young people fail each other and themselves.

With Normal People, Rooney established herself as the defining literary voice of her generation in English — a writer capable of rendering the texture of contemporary emotional life with a fidelity that feels like recognition. The novel was adapted into an acclaimed television series, but the book remains the thing: as intimate, as funny, and as quietly devastating as anything written in English in the past decade.

Essential contemporary fiction. Published by Faber & Faber.